Reflexes Lab

In this lab we worked with some of our different reflexes, for example, when something is thrown at your face or is jokingly fake thrown at your face, when you blink during that. A reflex is a rapid, predictable, and involuntary responses to stimuli. Reflexes work by setting off an electrical impulse that causes the unequal distribution of ions that goes through the nerves until it reaches the brain or spinal cord. Then the same process goes back through the nerves and to the body part, which then moves to react.
The photopupillary reflex is the automanic reflex, which is the reflex that regulates smooth muscles, heart, glands, saliva secretion, and changes in pupil size. For me the response of the pupil contracting at the sudden light worked really well, this function in humans is probably caused by us maybe used to hunt at night or from if we needed to, to defend ourselves from predators that might get us in the middle of the night.
The patellar reflex is the knee-jerk reflex, which is a two neuron reflex arc, which goes from the sensory neuron to the spinal cord, to the motor neuron, and back to the knee. At first it didn't work for me, but that's probably because of the fact that at first my partner wasn't hitting my leg in the right spot so the response didn't work, but when I did it to myself, the knee-jerk reflex worked perfectly fine. I believe that we have this response so that when we have to, we can start running after prey or away from a predator and our legs will be able to carry us the distance without our brain really thinking about having us run, instead it can be thinking on how to take down the prey or where to go to escape the predator.
The blink reflex is another automanic reflex, I believe, since most of the time we don't control when we blink, and we defiantly don't control ourselves blinking when something comes right for our face. When my partner threw the cotton ball at me when I was holding the clear plastic sheet infront of my face, and I blinked. I think that we blink when this happens, because it's our brain's response to protect our eyes from any foreign object from entering, so that they don't get damaged and we can continue to be able to see.
The plantar reflex I would say it's part of the somatic reflex or the withdrawal reflex. For me, my toes curled up, when the pen was dragged up my foot. This reaction, I'm pretty sure is because of us protecting our feet maybe, so it's basically either the same reaction when we step on a sharp rock or when we stub our toe on something.
The last part of the lab we did was to test not our reflexes, but instead to test our response time. We took a yardstick and taking turns, we put our hand under the yard stick while the other person holds the yardstick and drops it at a random time for the person to grab it as fast as they can, where ever they catch on the yardstick, that measurement will dictate how fast was their reaction time. After three measurements, we did the same thing another three times while texting to see how texting affects our reaction time. As expected, the average of my normal reactions was much faster than the average of my reactions while I was texting. My average reaction time was 0.13 seconds, while my reaction time while texting was 0.185 seconds. Texting really delayed my reaction time by a lot, for example, I used to be a pitcher in softball and if you didn't react quick enough then you would get nailed in the face by that line drive to your face. Comparing my two reaction times based off of that is just the difference of me having my glove up and catching the ball vs. the ball nailing me in the face and getting taken out.